Brought to you by the letter 'O'

I have a tendency to ardently believe things that are not true. That’s the tricky part of logic and an even sketchier part of memory: the truth is hard to decipher when the picture you've painted in your head just keeps getting more vibrant as time goes by.

For instance, I am convinced that I saw Sid Vicious rocking out with Ernie and Bert on Sesame Street even though I know it’s utterly impossible. For seven years I believed that Tommy Chong died in a terrible car accident, and that was why Cheech Marin ended up on Nash Bridges with Don Johnson.

Sadly, this memory affliction goes beyond my recollections of network TV lineups to a time in which reminiscence is not humanly possible.

When I was 9 years old I asked my mother if there were Venetian blinds in the nursery of the hospital where I was born. When she told me there had been, I became thoroughly convinced I remembered crows standing on the ledge looking in at me. “They were there,” I argued, when she told me the memory wasn’t real. “I just didn’t know what they were called until much later.”

So when Ittybit toddles over to the stack of DVDs that I had spilled from atop the player, selects a powder blue disc devoid of any cartoon likenesses out of the hodgepodge of scattered children’s titles and exclaims: “Oh, that’s Elmo’s World,” my jaw drops open and I find myself wrestling with a new version of the truth.

I pull her close to me, suffocating her in a hug. This has to be a joke. I pick out another bland looking disc from the pile and wave it in the air, looking over my shoulder to make sure ventriloquism isn’t the cause of this new skill. “What’s this one?” I ask her. “Yoga,” she smiles, although her words sound more like "yo-ya."

Where’s the phone? Digging it out from under the couch cushions, I call my husband’s cell number. “Does this sound crazy? I think Ittybit can read,” I yell into the receiver, wondering all the while how the Babydoll learned this without constant intervention and pop quizzes and calculating how long we will be able to hide her from the government.

"That's nice, honey. Did the mail come?"

I wasn't ready for this grown up girl. I was still reeling from the recent shift away from being “Mama” to my new role as “Mommy,” when her new "reading" skills crept up on me.

This requires more investigation. I grab her up and whisk her into the kitchen and toward the alphabet magnets on the fridge. She starts to recite the letters on her own, picking up her favorites and separating them from the rest of the herd. A. B. C. E. I. T. … O.

It’s not as if I hadn’t noticed she’d shown preferences. She always stops her sing-song recitation on the letter P. She refuses to say Q. I can’t blame her, after “elemenopee” the fun kind of ebbs away.

Her aversion to the letter Q, I believe, is likely the result of my bringing the magnets with me to the doctors’ office on the occasion of her second-year checkup. All she wanted was her favorite letter -- “O” -- while the nurse was trying to take a blood sample, and O was the ONLY letter of the 26 that didn’t make it into the bag. In desperation, as her cries arced into a crescendo, I tried to substitute the letter Q by holding my thumb over the tail. She wouldn’t have it.

Already, our truths are colliding. And all I can hope for is that the O is somewhere in the car.